Don’t ignore popularity of youth running sports

I again read with interest this year’s SportsBusiness Journal
youth sports analysis (Aug. 17-23).
Ironically, the total sum of the “running” sports in high school (track
and field and cross country, boys and girls) exceeds 1.2 million and is the
most popular participatory sport for scholastic age children. Local newspapers
and now Web sites across America are filled with articles and results from this
sport and ArmoryTrack.com, our local Web site, receives 2 million page views
monthly and is part of a national network, MileSplit, which records close to 20
million per month.

Despite these numbers,
chronically, there is little attention afforded by SportsBusiness Journal to
this huge number of American youth many of whom will actually continue their
sport into adult life as joggers, competitors and even marathoners. It would be
prudent from a business model to not miss all these very loyal fans of
tomorrow. Of interest, the SGMA survey of kids playing on team sports is not
accurate as they use very soft and skewed indicators for actual participation
in organized sports.